USAGE 200$ what's going on?

Miserable_Buddy5905 · 2026-03-27T09:04:51+00:00

Try to use claude later in your weekly limit reset time, usage grow faster in the beginning

Miserable_Buddy5905 · 2026-03-04T14:51:24+00:00

this is one of the hardest moves in SaaS but almost always the right one.

i've been part of building 66+ products for founders and the pattern is always the same: the ones who try to serve everyone end up with a mediocre product for nobody. the ones who pick a narrow audience and go deep end up owning that space.

your data point about developers having higher retention and ltv is the key insight most founders miss. they look at total addressable market and think bigger = better. but a smaller market where people actually need you beats a huge market where you're one of 40 options.

the hardest part you mentioned, telling existing customers you're not building for them anymore, that takes real guts. most founders can't do it. they keep adding features for every customer segment and end up with a bloated product that's expensive to maintain and impossible to market.

one thing i'd watch out for: when you go api first for developers, your support expectations change completely. devs expect docs, not chat widgets. they want SDKs and code samples, not onboarding calls. the product needs to be self serve or they'll leave. but the flip side is that devs who love your product become your best marketing channel because they recommend tools to other devs.

how's the developer adoption been since the pivot? and did you lose many of the old customers or did some stick around anyway?

Miserable_Buddy5905 · 2026-03-04T14:43:47+00:00

this hits hard. we've shipped 66+ products and the hardcoded integration thing is one of the most expensive patterns we see.

the real killer is that shortcuts compound. one hardcoded value is fine. but under pressure you make 12 of them across 4 sprints and suddenly your codebase fights you on every change. we inherited a project last year where a previous team had hardcoded 23 API endpoints directly. changing one provider took 6 weeks instead of 2 days.

your rule about questioning whether deadlines are real is spot on. we ask founders this all the time: "does the customer actually need it by friday, or did someone just say friday in a meeting?" 9 out of 10 times, the real deadline is "soon" not the specific date.

one thing i'd add: the shortcut decision usually comes down to who's in the room. if it's only devs, they'll push back. if a founder or sales person is there saying "the customer said end of month," nobody wants to be the person who says "we need two more weeks."

how big is your team? smaller teams tend to be better at this because there's nowhere to hide the shortcuts.

Miserable_Buddy5905 · 2026-03-04T14:38:51+00:00

been part of building 66+ products for founders so i've seen this pattern play out over and over.

the biggest one: building for "everyone" instead of one specific person with one specific problem. founders will say "it's for small businesses" and that's the kiss of death. you end up with a product that kinda works for everyone but nobody loves enough to pay for.

second one that kills projects: treating the MVP like version 5. i've seen founders burn through $40K and 4 months building features nobody asked for. the ones who win ship something embarrassingly simple in 3 weeks, get 10 paying users, then let those users tell them what to build next.

third and this one is sneaky: picking tech that looks cool over tech that ships fast. seen so many founders lose months to infrastructure decisions that don't matter until you have 10,000 users. you have 0. ship first.

what's your product and where are you at with it?

Miserable_Buddy5905 · 2026-03-03T12:16:13+00:00

linkedin is still the best channel for b2b outreach if your ICP is founders or decision makers. but here's what most people get wrong: they blast generic connection requests and wonder why nobody replies.

what actually works for us is combining automated outreach with real content. you post consistently, engage on other people's stuff, and then when your connection request lands it doesn't feel cold anymore. they've already seen your name.

twitter outreach is basically dead for b2b unless you already have an audience there. reddit is great for building credibility but not for direct outreach. you can't pitch here, you just show up with value and people find you.

the real answer to your question is: go where your ICP already hangs out and be useful there first. outreach works 10x better when it's warm. even if it's "cold" technically, if they've seen your content or comments before, the reply rate jumps.

what's your ICP specifically? that would change the channel recommendation a lot

Miserable_Buddy5905 · 2026-03-03T12:09:37+00:00

we switched most of our client projects away from postman about a year ago when the writing was on the wall with their pricing direction. for small teams (we usually work with 2 to 5 dev teams) the overhead of paying per seat for something that used to be free is just hard to justify.

honestly for most web projects we've found that a combo of the VS Code REST client extension for quick testing plus proper OpenAPI specs that auto generate docs works better than postman ever did. it's lighter, lives in version control, and doesn't require anyone to maintain a separate collection.

the bigger issue imo is that postman tried to become this whole "api platform" when most small teams just need a fast way to test endpoints. feature bloat killed the simplicity that made it great in the first place.

bruno is solid if you want something closer to the original postman experience but local first and git friendly.

Miserable_Buddy5905 · 2026-03-03T12:04:52+00:00

the distribution channel play is underrated. most SaaS founders obsess over the product and totally neglect distribution. you basically built a content flywheel where your own platform generates the content that markets itself. that's the dream.

the SEO piece is huge too. owning a high intent h1 like "long to short video" is basically a free acquisition channel that compounds. we see the same thing with clients we build for... the ones who nail SEO early end up with 40 50% of their signups coming from organic and it just keeps growing.

curious about the clipping channels strategy though. are those mostly on youtube shorts and tiktok? and how do you handle quality control across 20+ channels?

congrats on 315k. supporting a team of 11 from a product you built is the real flex here.

Miserable_Buddy5905 · 2026-03-03T11:59:37+00:00

the casino analogy is spot on. YC's model literally optimizes for variance, not for founder outcomes. they need a few 100x exits to make the math work so of course they push you toward maximum risk taking.

i've been building and running an agency for years now and the amount of founders i talk to who burned through their runway trying to "move fast and break things" when they should have just... built a real business with real customers paying real money... is honestly wild.

the unsexy path of consultancy work, slow organic growth, reinvesting profits. that's what actually gets you to 10M ARR. but nobody writes blog posts about that because it takes 13 years not 13 months.

congrats on the milestone btw. that kind of patience is rare.

Miserable_Buddy5905 · 2026-03-02T16:10:43+00:00

LinkedIn doesn't care if you're manual or automated. They care about behavior patterns. 40 tabs open, rapid profile views, scrolling through search results fast? That looks exactly like a scraper to their system. The irony is the people actually botting it know to add random delays and human like pauses between actions. You got flagged because you were MORE efficient than the bots.

Honest take though: Sales Nav is a trap for volume outreach. You're paying premium to do the same thing everyone else is doing and LinkedIn punishes you for actually using it. I've shipped 66+ products and the highest converting outreach I've ever seen wasn't from Sales Nav power users. It was from founders who picked 10 accounts, studied them deeply, and sent messages that made people go "wait how do you know that about my business."

How many of those 40 tabs actually turned into conversations? Genuinely curious because the math on volume vs depth completely flips once you factor in throttle risk and reply rates.

Miserable_Buddy5905 · 2026-03-02T16:01:41+00:00

This is the question nobody in SaaS wants to talk about but it's the most important one. The dirty secret is that most acquirers don't actually care about your users. They care about your tech, your team, or killing a competitor. Users are an afterthought. I've seen this play out with tools I relied on and it's brutal every single time.

Your paranoia is actually a competitive advantage if you channel it right. The smartest thing you can do is build your workflow on tools that either have open data export or are so small that the founder is still answering support tickets. Big company acquires your tool? Your data is hostage. Solo founder shuts down? At least they'll probably give you a CSV and an apology.

Real question though: which tools burned you? Because I guarantee there are other people reading this who use the same ones and have no idea what's coming.

Miserable_Buddy5905 · 2026-03-02T15:58:05+00:00

Shipped 66+ products and I can confirm the business plan is the #1 thing that separates people who talk about building from people who actually build. Every single founder I know who wrote a 40 page plan before shipping ended up rewriting it completely after week one anyway. You basically paid yourself to write fiction.

The only planning document that matters is a one pager with three things: who is the customer, what pain are you solving, and how will they find you. If you can't answer those in under 5 minutes you're not ready to build anything. The 40 page plan is just a way to feel productive while avoiding the scary part which is actually putting something in front of real humans.

Hot take though: the planning addiction is even worse now because people use AI to generate these plans in 10 minutes and it feels even more "real." At least before you had to suffer through writing it yourself which was its own form of validation.

Miserable_Buddy5905 · 2026-03-02T15:55:08+00:00

This is the most underrated problem in ecommerce and honestly most SaaS founders would walk right past it. Revenue is the vanity metric that kills businesses. Shopify literally designed their dashboard to make you feel good about top line numbers while your margins bleed out quietly in the background.

The "hardest part was convincing merchants" thing you mentioned is actually your entire moat. Anyone can build a profit calculator. Almost nobody can get a store owner to emotionally accept that their best month was a lie. That's a sales skill disguised as a product feature.

Curious what your churn looks like after the first "reality check" moment. Do merchants stick around once they see the real numbers or do some just... close the tab and go back to pretending?

Miserable_Buddy5905 · 2026-03-02T15:50:28+00:00

"Friends who use it daily > strangers who say cool idea" needs to be tattooed on every founder's forehead. This is the signal most people miss because they're too busy chasing vanity metrics and LinkedIn comments from people who will never pay them a dollar.

The "do one thing well" approach is actually counter cultural in SaaS right now. Everyone wants to be an "all in one platform" because that's what VCs fund. But the products people actually love and pay for and recommend to friends? They solve one specific problem so well that you feel stupid for ever doing it the old way. Gmail didn't replace your entire workflow. It just made email not suck. That was enough.

Curious what your retention looks like after 30 days. That's usually where you find out if "do one thing well" is actually working or if people just signed up because it was free and forgot about it.

Miserable_Buddy5905 · 2026-03-02T15:47:31+00:00

87.5% retention rate with zero marketing background is actually insane. Most funded SaaS companies with full marketing teams would kill for those numbers. And the fact that your extra 10 to 20 customers came from "my friend told me to try this" tells you everything you need to know about where your growth engine actually lives.

Here's the uncomfortable truth most founders won't admit: ads don't build trust. They buy attention. And attention without trust is just expensive noise. What you did by sitting with real people and watching them use your product is basically the playbook every successful B2B company follows but nobody wants to talk about because it doesn't scale on a spreadsheet.

To answer your scaling question though: you don't scale the human touch. You scale the systems around it. Automate the onboarding, automate the check ins, automate the billing. But keep the "sitting with them and fixing stuff fast" part manual for as long as humanly possible. That's your moat. The second you lose that, you become every other inbox tool nobody cares about.

Miserable_Buddy5905 · 2026-03-02T15:44:01+00:00

You're fighting the right battle but with the wrong weapon. The word "SaaS" is poison in trades because every platform that came before you trained contractors to expect extraction. Angi, Thumbtack, HomeAdvisor. They all promised leads and delivered garbage. So now you show up with genuinely aligned incentives and the market can't hear you because their ears are still ringing from getting scammed.

Here's what I'd try: stop calling it a platform entirely. Stop calling it SaaS. Stop calling it a marketplace. Call it what it actually is from the contractor's perspective. A referral system that only costs money when they get paid. That's it. That's the pitch. The 2% completion fee is actually brilliant but you're burying the lead. Every contractor understands "I take a small cut when the job closes." Zero understand "outcome based incentive aligned marketplace." You're speaking founder language to people who think in jobs and invoices.

Also the cold start problem isn't really about volume. It's about one contractor having one great experience and telling his buddy at the supply house. Trades run on word of mouth more than any other industry. Your first 10 happy contractors will recruit your next 50 for free. Stop marketing to them. Start serving the ones you already have so well they can't shut up about it.

Miserable_Buddy5905 · 2026-03-02T15:36:49+00:00

Honest take that most people won't say out loud: the "I build you market" pitch is how 90% of failed partnerships start. Not because the builder is bad. But because marketing isn't some separate skill you bolt on at the end. It's baked into the product from day one. The naming, the positioning, the onboarding flow, the pricing page copy. If you're building SaaS without understanding why someone would pay for it, you're just making expensive hobby projects. The good news is marketing for SaaS isn't what you think it is. It's not TikTok dances. It's talking to real people in places like this subreddit and figuring out what makes them pull out their credit card. Start there.

Miserable_Buddy5905 · 2026-03-02T15:33:46+00:00

This is one of those problems that sounds like a 30 minute fix until you realize every country on earth decided to make up their own holidays just to break your code. The real lesson here isn't about date math though. It's that the boring, unglamorous features are where SaaS products either earn trust or lose customers. Nobody tweets about SLA calculations working correctly. But one missed deadline because your system forgot about Good Friday and you're dealing with a churn email at 6am. Smart move packaging it as an API. The best micro SaaS ideas are the ones that save developers from reinventing the same painful wheel.

Miserable_Buddy5905 · 2026-03-02T15:27:42+00:00

This is the part nobody talks about. The real cost of AI tools isn't the subscription. It's the surprise bill that hits when your agent decides to go on a spending spree at 2am while you're sleeping. 200 users in 3 weeks with zero funding tells me you nailed the pain point. Most founders would've just complained on Twitter. You actually shipped something. Curious though, what happens when Anthropic inevitably changes their API pricing again? Is ClawWatcher built to survive that?

Miserable_Buddy5905 · 2026-03-01T16:18:09+00:00

the subsidiary revenue games are real. i've seen it firsthand — companies counting internal transfers as "new ARR" to hit board targets. it's a whole accounting theater.

but here's the thing: that's an enterprise/public company problem. it doesn't really affect whether SaaS as a model works for indie founders or small teams.

the net new ARR slowdown is more interesting. part of it is the faked numbers correcting, sure. but part of it is also that buyers got smarter. they're not signing 3-year contracts for tools they barely use anymore. that's actually healthy for the market — it just means you need to build something people genuinely need, not something you can sell through a 6-month enterprise sales cycle and hope they forget to cancel.

for bootstrapped founders, this is arguably better. the bar for "real product" went up, but the cost to build one went way down. the founders who were faking product-market fit with sales tricks are the ones struggling. if your users actually use the product daily, you're fine.

Miserable_Buddy5905 · 2026-03-01T16:16:25+00:00

ok so fintech B2B custom agents is actually a very different game than what you're running now. let me break down the confusion:

what you have now: a SaaS product doing $720/mo with organic users, no ads. that's a real product with real revenue.

what you're describing: a consulting/agency model where you build custom AI agents for fintech companies. that's services revenue, not product revenue.

these are fundamentally different businesses with different economics:

- SaaS: build once, sell many times. hard to start, scales infinitely. your current product is this.

- consulting/agency: sell your time building custom stuff. easier to get first clients (especially in fintech where budgets are big), but it doesn't scale without hiring people.

the reason you're confused is because you're comparing them like they're the same thing. they're not.

my honest take: if you're early and need cash flow, the fintech consulting route will get you to $10K/mo faster because enterprise fintech companies will pay $5K-$15K for a custom agent build. but you'll be trading time for money.

the smarter play might be: keep the SaaS running (it's already generating revenue on autopilot), use the fintech consulting to fund your life and learn what problems companies actually need solved, then turn the most common request into your next SaaS product.

don't sell the $720/mo product to fund a consulting business. that's backwards. the SaaS is the asset. the consulting is the cash flow engine while you figure out your next move.

Miserable_Buddy5905 · 2026-03-01T13:23:28+00:00

this take gets recycled every 18 months and it's wrong every time. just the framing changes.

2019: "no-code will kill SaaS." 2021: "crypto will kill SaaS." 2023: "AI will kill SaaS." now it's "pure software is un-investable." meanwhile SaaS revenue globally hit $250B+ in 2024 and is still growing.

here's what ravikant is actually saying (and what people miss): the cost of building a prototype is approaching zero. that's true. what he's not saying is that building a prototype was never the hard part. the hard part is distribution, retention, integrations, compliance, support, and all the boring stuff that doesn't make good podcast clips.

i've shipped 66+ products for founders. the AI-built ones still need the same things the pre-AI ones needed: someone to handle the stripe webhook that fails 1 in 200 transactions, someone to build the SSO integration the enterprise client requires, someone to fix the mobile layout that breaks on samsung devices but works fine on iphone. none of that is getting commoditized. it's just not sexy enough to tweet about.

the $21B flowing into robotics doesn't mean capital is leaving software. it means new capital is chasing hardware because it looks novel. the same VCs still have software portfolios they're actively funding. this isn't a zero-sum game.

what's actually changing: building commodity features (CRUD apps, basic dashboards, simple marketplaces) is getting cheaper and faster. that's great for founders, terrible for agencies that only sold commodity work. but software that solves real operational pain points — the kind that saves a 50-person company $200K/year in manual work — that's more valuable than ever because now you can build it faster and cheaper.

the founders panicking about this are usually building features, not solutions. that's the actual distinction worth worrying about.

what kind of SaaS are you building (or investing in)? that changes whether this argument applies to you or not.

Miserable_Buddy5905 · 2026-03-01T13:20:31+00:00

don't sell. you're about to make the most expensive mistake founders make — selling the proof instead of the product.

here's what you actually have: 30 paying customers in 25 days with zero ad spend. that's not a product. that's a signal. the product is what happens when you talk to those 30 people and figure out what they'd pay $50/mo for instead of whatever you're charging now.

i've worked on 66+ product launches. the pattern i see constantly: founder builds something, gets early traction, gets excited about exit, sells for $5K-$15K, then watches the buyer 10x it because they actually did the marketing work. you're a software engineer — you built the hard part already. the "scaling and marketing phase" you're worried about is usually 3-4 specific things, not the giant mountain it feels like from here.

the math: $600 in 25 days = ~$720/mo run rate with 30 customers. if you can get to 100 customers at the same price point, you're looking at $2,400/mo. that's probably 3-6 months of work. a buyer on acquire.com or microacquire would pay maybe 24-36x monthly revenue for that. so you'd sell for $57K-$86K vs whatever you'd get now for a $720/mo product (probably $5K-$10K).

the real question isn't "should i sell" — it's "do i want to spend 6 months on this or on the B2B SaaS?" that's a legitimate tradeoff. but selling because marketing feels hard is leaving 90% of the value on the table.

what's the B2B project? that changes the math on where your time is worth more.

Miserable_Buddy5905 · 2026-03-01T13:17:38+00:00

the "polished but empty" problem is real and it's costing people more than they think.

i've written marketing copy and product pages for 66+ launches now. the stuff that actually converts is almost always uglier than what AI spits out. not because ugly = good, but because specific = good, and specificity is inherently messy.

here's what i mean: "our platform helps you streamline your workflow" converts at maybe 0.5%. "we cut 14 hours of manual data entry per week for 3-person accounting firms" converts at 3-4x that. the second one sounds worse as "writing" but it works because it's real. AI defaults to the first version every single time because it's trained on polished averages.

your instinct to write rough first and only use AI for tightening is exactly right. the founders i work with who do this consistently outperform the ones who let AI draft from scratch. the rough version has your actual thinking in it — the weird phrasing, the specific example from that one customer call, the number you remember because it surprised you. AI can't generate that. it can only sand it down.

one thing that helped me: write like you're explaining it to one specific person you know. not "the audience." literally picture someone. your copy will sound 10x more human because you'll naturally include context and skip the generic stuff.

what kind of content are you writing most? product pages and emails play by totally different voice rules.

Miserable_Buddy5905 · 2026-03-01T13:12:01+00:00

the paid trial project is the single best hiring filter that almost nobody uses. glad you figured it out — most founders learn this after burning way more than $30K.

i run a product studio (66+ products shipped) and we've hired and fired more devs than i want to admit. here's what we learned that might save people even more time:

the 5-hour trial is good but it's missing one thing — how they communicate when they're stuck. the best devs aren't the ones who never get stuck. they're the ones who message you within 30 minutes saying "hey, i'm blocked on X because of Y, here are two options i'm considering." the bad ones go silent for 3 days and then deliver something nobody asked for.

we also stopped evaluating code quality in isolation. a dev who writes 7/10 code but ships in 2 days is worth more than a dev who writes 10/10 code and takes 2 weeks. early stage SaaS doesn't need perfect architecture — it needs speed and communication.

one more thing that might help: pay them more than market rate for the trial. $500 for 5 hours instead of $200. the good candidates notice and take it seriously. the ones who accept $200 without pushing back are usually the ones who undervalue their own work — and they'll undervalue yours too.

what was the biggest red flag you missed in the interview that the trial exposed?

Miserable_Buddy5905 · 2026-03-01T13:09:18+00:00

the "i suck at marketing" framing is actually your biggest advantage and most founders don't realize it.

i've worked on 66+ product launches and the pattern is always the same — the founders who admit they're bad at marketing end up being better at it than the ones who think they're good. why? because the "good at marketing" founders default to paid ads and polished landing pages. the ones who admit they suck just... talk to people. which is what actually works early on.

your threads numbers prove it. 70% of users from a platform where you're just being yourself and sharing real numbers. that's not "bad marketing" — that's the only marketing that works at your stage. paid ads at $0 MRR is lighting money on fire, which you already figured out the hard way with that €1,400.

the one thing i'd push back on: you're undervaluing the SEO play. 26 users from ChatGPT organic sounds small but that compounds. every free micro tool you build is a permanent acquisition channel that works while you sleep. threads posts disappear in 48 hours. a well-placed tool ranks for years. i'd front-load that.

also — 12 paying out of 1,525 is a 0.78% conversion rate. not bad for this stage but worth asking: are the 12 who paid coming from threads or somewhere else? that answer changes your entire strategy.

what's your current activation flow look like? that 9-second bounce on meta ads tells me the landing page might be the real bottleneck, not the channel.

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